The blog for the cult Manhattan cable-access TV show that offers viewers the best in "everything from high art to low trash... and back again!" Find links to rare footage, original reviews, and reflections on pop culture and arthouse cinema.

Monday, July 22, 2013

I
don’t ever comment on doings in the film-fan universe, because they
usually need too much explaining to the general populace and often
concern disagreements about films I don't care about. In the case of the
latest online genre-movie fan controversy
— the discovery that a horror reviewer who called herself “Lianne
Spiderbaby” was stealing chunks of her reviews from genre-movie
reviewers and online bloggers — I just wanted to weigh in to
explore how this relates to what one commenter on the controversy
called “our cut-and-paste culture” and also offer my own take on
what seems to be behind these incredibly
stupid actions.

First,
the details: the reviewer in question is a Canadian horror fangirl
named Lianne MacDougall who has acquired a modicum of online
celebrity for two things: being a woman who reviews horror movies;
and dating Quentin Tarantino (more specifically attending the Oscars
with him in a flashy-topped dress and going out on a boat with him in
a bikini).

It was revealed on various genre-movie websites last week
that in her reviewing she systematically and shamelessly
cut-and-pasted lines from other peoples’ reviews, most often of
film synopses and comments about individual films (to be included in her "profiles" of these people). Specifics
of what she nabbed can be found on Mike White’s terrific
“Impossible Funky” site and on the Latarnia Forums, where horror movie expert and former
access host/Funhouse friend Mirek Lipinski led a discussion about the
revelations. One of the first people whose work was stolen who spoke
up in detail was MaryAnn Johanson, who put a piece up on the
“Bleeding Cool” site, which removed said article abruptly the
other day (her update on the story can be found on her blog).

Because
of MacDougall’s connection to Tarantino, the plagiarism story gained traction
online, with stories appearing on the mainstream Defamer and
Guardian sites. The important thing to realize about her
actions is that she used lines stolen from other writers all throughout
her work, even in her online videos (now all set to “Private” on
YouTube).

I
saw a few of the videos before they were “locked,” and they
definitely were elaborate little productions — she and her friends
would act out horror sketches and then she’d discuss
specific movies with her brother (whose opinions, thoughts, and
reviews were his own), followed by her doing an on-camera review of a low-level
cult pic, which included stolen lines from reviews that could easily
be looked up on Google.

As
time went on, it appears that MacDougall’s theft got more and more
daring. From stealing entire chunks of other folks’ hard work, she
began to discuss film in her pieces in a more academic way. In a
piece she wrote about Almodovar’s wonderfully weird The
Skin I Live Infor the very reputable Video
Watchdog magazine, she decided to cite the esteemed film
theorist Laura Mulvey by appropriating (okay, *taking*) a Mulvey citation by film academic Steven Jay Schneider. If it’s too
hard to watch and write about films, trying to namecheck an academic
you’re not familiar with is certain suicide.

A
few points about this story:

—
She wanted to get caught.
There’s definitely a pathology at work here, similar to the kind of
thing that is manifested by celebrities who decide to pick up hookers
on the street or in their cars. It takes a curious mixture of ego,
blunt-edged craftiness, and misguided ballsiness to do what
“Spiderbaby” chose to do. She may have had passing thoughts about
getting caught, but there was clearly also an air of hauteur involved
— “these lowly Internet writers did all the research for me. And
the readers? They’re not worth my time….”

—
She mostly used online sources. See
above — if she was not wanting to get caught, there are countless
other ways to go, including other methods of gathering reviews to
“borrow” from and hiring interns to do the work for you (a number
of different reviewers over the years have had interns or freelancers
who do their work for them — one film historian who was very prolific
for years would hire entire teams to write his books for him).

The
reason this story got so much traction in the fan world is that
“Spiderbaby”
was earning money selling reviews that she stole from other people's work. Many of those writers were bloggers who get no money
for their writing; they are doing it as a labor of love (ahem ahem)
and are happy to do so. MacDougall was SO eager to purloin prose that
she even took lines from IMDB reader reviews!

–
She piled lies on top of lies.
One of the first people to defend her on a horror-fan threaded forum
was Video Watchdog editor Tim
Lucas. He stood by her, he said, because he felt the abuse heaped on
her was a result of her being attractive and Tarantino's
girlfriend. Also — and this is key — because she had assured him that
the two pieces she wrote for him were entirely free of plagiarism.

On
further research, Lucas publicly admitted that he was wrong and that
she had lied to him. There is an analysis of her latest piece for his
great magazine – the best around, along with Videoscope
and Shock Cinema – and its stolen elements on the Video Watchdog blog. Lucas has a lot of respect in the
horror/zine/genre film community, so her swearing to him she didn't
steal was obviously a desperate move, made around the same time she
publicly apologized for her plagiarism on Twitter (a Tweet that has
since been removed).

–
It's apparent she didn't enjoy watching
movies (or writing about them). A lot was made, of course,
about Lianne's dating Tarantino, since he was the news “hook”
(this is really news only to a small tight-knit community of
genre-movie fans and writers). I was a “true believer” when he
hit the scene, loving Reservoir Dogs to pieces
(still do). The problem was, that as his exploitation-driven
filmmaking “vision” got more and more epic, I began to see little
more than genre-pic citations carried off with much flair – and
enormous budgets and big-name stars.

One
thing that has always been true about Tarantino, though, is that it's
apparent he's seen the films he “borrows”
from. I found his advocating Sergio Corbucci as one of the best-ever
Western directors (with him intentionally negating Ford, Hawks,
Boetticher, Mann, etc.) to be nothing short of ridiculous. But it is
clear that Quentin watched Corbucci and honestly, misguidedly, felt
that a somewhat talented craftsman (read: hack) deserved to be in the
company of Leone and Peckinpah (jeezis!) and was better than the truly
great Western filmmakers of the past.

For
instance – and here, yeah, I'm falling into the same trap as other journalists of
talking at length about Tarantino when talking about “Spiderbaby,” but it's so easy, since the topic of “borrowing” is common to
both, albeit in different modes – the man who shrinks from journalistic inquiry and has formulated theories of “cinema
studies” (and, recently, American history) out of sheer adulation for certain exploitation directors' work (and I love
exploitation directors, as regular readers and viewers will know),
does have a proactive stance toward “borrowing.”

The
most blatant case, and one that I don't see addressed often enough
(if ever), was his blatant “acquisition” of the skewed chronology
used in The Killing. Mike White, who
coincidentally was one of the first people to enumerate the thefts of
“Spiderbaby,” has addressed at length how Reservoir Dogs was based on City on Fire, whether
consciously or unconsciously (a la George Harrison evoking “He's So
Fine” note for note). What has not been emphasized is that Tarantino used
the skewed chronology created by Jim Thompson and Kubrick not
once, not once twice, not thrice, but a total of four fuckin' times.

It
began with Reservoir Dogs, where it was openly
purloined from Kubrick, seemingly as an “homage.” Then it showed
up again in Pulp Fiction, seemingly to cover over
the fact that there were several different plot strands going on (from
different scripts?) and to give the film an “epic” feel. THEN it
was used in Jackie Brown in an utterly gratuitous
fashion to “spice up” a caper scene.

And THEN
(!) in Kill Bill, again to make what
could've/should've been an exploitation flick (with an enormous budget and big-name stars) an “epic,” it was
used, causing viewers like myself to literally say out loud,
“no, no... not again!!!” (Is it possible that Quentin was "borrowing" from Alain
Robbe-Grillet's time-shifting scenarios, or Harold Pinter's
Betrayal, or Jane Campion's Two
Friends? Nah – he just watches violent pitchas....)

So,
we come back full circle to “Lianne Spiderbaby” (as her goofy
writing credit ran). No matter what we may think of his cinematic
output, we do get the impression that Tarantino really loves watching
films; whereas, with her cut-and-paste style of assembling a review (rather
than writing out what she's seen), we come to the conclusion that MacDougall really doesn't like watching movies – OR she really loathes being a
writer.

–
She never made a library visit.
I recently reread the short-story collection The Many Loves
of Dobie Gillis by Max Shulman (in conjunction with this piece – which contains all my own opinions and wordings, for
good or ill). Shulman wrote these stories back in the Forties, and
even THEN he had the formula for “innovative” plagiarism down (so that Dobie can do something "crooked" and then feel bad – and then get caught):
you find a really obscure source and steal from that, assuming no one
can find the text.

Using
texts that can easily be Googled, and were in fact expressly written
for the Internet, is simply daring the reader to discover where you
got your “ideas” from. (Return to the first point above.)

– She was content to use only one source! I
haven't often talked about my professional experiences (well, there
was this one time), but early on I had two jobs in which I was
required to “assemble” short reviews from other sources. I was
not comfortable with it, but the pieces didn't carry my name (and one
was my first important job out of college, so I was just thrilled to be getting paid for "creative writing"). In another instance I
was instructed to assemble critical opinion and cite the sources in
the text; that assignment had my name on it.

In
both cases, I found that the way one puts together a review of a
movie one hasn't seen is to use more than one source,
preferably at least three (how can you trust what only one reviewer
says?). Also OF COURSE one *rewords* what one has read elsewhere –
otherwise where does the notion of “writing” come in? That's what
a writer is supposed to be able to do, on occasion: summarize an
argument or opinion using one's own words....

As
a friend remarked to me in discussing the “Lianne Spiderbaby”
stupidity, “didn't she even think of using a thesaurus?” Well,
the answer is no, because she wasn't into writing at all. One of the
few joys that comes from this
discipline/craft/art/whateverthefuckitis is that you are exercising
your skill in expression, even if you're just summing up arguments
made by others. To re-use their words and not put quotation marks
around 'em? Well, that's stealing.

What
was also extremely interesting – to genre-movie fans and freelance
writers like myself – was that the outing of MacDougall raised
other issues: the fact that one major publication has (or doesn't
have, this was disputed) a “sliding scale” for its contributors;
the sad notion that MacDougall was able to score not one but *two*
book deals through the connections she made submitting stolen reviews
and dating Tarantino (UPDATE: the impending book about grindhouse actresses has been "withdrawn" by MacDougall – the introduction contained a number of lifts from other writers); and the very sad fact that her “outing” was
going to possibly make dumber readers think that many women
horror-fans and reviewers (for whom she was becoming a “symbol”
of success) are like her. (This notion was countered in a list of dedicated female horror-film reviewers who write
their own work!)UPDATE (7/25): The posters on the Latarnia forum have continued to look into the immense amount of plagiarism MacDougall committed. One poster, "Udar55," has discovered that parts of her thesis for college on Deep Throat contains chunks lifted from several sources, including Watergate.info, the official Watergate site (!). Udar55 also has kept an ongoing list of her "sources" (read: confirmed plagiarism) and it now includes DVD liner notes, Wikipedia, IMDB reviewers, Janet Maslin, film professors, a true crime author, biographer Patrick McGilligan, and countless bloggers and others who provide their writing for free online.Here is a proud quote from Tarantino that was also uploaded to the Latarnia forum: “I steal from every single movie ever made. I love it – if my work has
anything it’s that I’m taking this from this and that from that and
mixing them together. If people don’t like that, then tough titty, don’t
go and see it, alright? I steal from everything. Great artists steal;
they don’t do homages.” A poster named Michael Elliott added the obvious corollary – "Perhaps [his films are acclaimed] because mainstream critics don't know much about many of the films he borrows from."For
me, this whole affair was a fascinating and pathetic revelation, for it showed how
this one reviewer, this inconsiderate, unethical individual, this
soulless, uncaring movie “fan,” was willing for her own nefarious
purposes... to blaspheme the title of Jack Hill's classic weirdo
horror-comedy.

Monday, July 15, 2013

Continuing along from the mind-boggling Sixties
world of Fred Mogubgub (see below), we hit the early Seventies work of the
recently departed British animator John David Wilson. Wilson died last month at the age
of 93, leaving behind an interesting body of cartoons and collaborations. I
want to showcase his work crafting cartoon “music videos” for The
Sonny and Cher Show. They’re odd little creations that, as with the
Mogubgub shorts, serve as perfect time capsules for an era.

But first, a little background: Wilson’s biography is best sketched on the website for his company, Fine Arts Films. There is an article he wrote in 2002 outlining his career
(which should have been an entire book). He was an arts student before being
drafted into WWII. After suffering a serious injury he was sent back home to England and
went back to art work. He found employment in the art department of Pinewood
studios and then worked for GB Animation, a J. Arthur Rank company.

He moved to the U.S. with his family in 1950 and
found work at UPA, where he worked on the “Gerald McBoing-Boing” and “Mr.
Magoo” series, among others. His next stop was Disney, where he worked as an
animator on Peter Pan and Lady and the
Tramp.

In 1955 he founded his own company, Fine Arts Films, to produce the Japanese-themed short “Tara, the Stonecutter.” His
premiere achievement around this time was “Petroushka” (1956), the first-ever
animated TV special (which aired on NBC as part of the “Sol Hurok Music Hour”).
The cartoon was based on Stavinsky’s ballet, with Stravinsky himself conducting
the orchestra.

Among the projects he worked on during the late
Fifties and early Sixties were commercials created by Stan Freberg and
The Flintstones for Hanna-Barbera. One of the more
fascinating Wilson/Fine Arts creations is this animated trailer for Billy
Wilder’s Irma La Douce. Said Wilson, “[The film] was all
about Parisian prostitutes romping about in Montmartre, and animation could
apparently make it acceptable.”

Fine Arts supplied a series of shorts to the
educational NBC show Exploring from 1964 to ’66. Wilson’s
most prominent creation, however, was yet to come: the 1971 feature cartoon
Shinbone Alley based on the archy and methitabel stories by
Don Marquis (and the play co-written by Mel Brooks). Carol Channing and Eddie
Bracken supply the main voices (with Alan “Fred Flintstone” Reed and John
Carradine, among others, lending support). The whole picture is currently up on
YT:

Throughout the Seventies, Wilson and Fine Arts
supplied animation to Laugh-In, The Midnight
Special, and The Carol Burnett Show, but one of
the Fine Arts creations that was seen by the most people worldwide was the
credit sequence for Grease:

To close out the biography section of this entry,
I’ll note that Wilson (right) did produce one complete music video, the one for Dylan’s
cwazy Kwistian anthem “Gotta Serve Somebody” (which is not online). Wilson was
quite busy in children’s television in the Eighties and Nineties working as
either an animator or animation director on shows like Fraggle
Rock, and Madeline.

But onto his cartoon “music videos.” These little
suckers made quite an impression on me when I was very young watching
The Sonny and Cher Show (because you watched variety shows
in those days, you watched all of ‘em, whether or not you cared about the hosts
— since there was always a chance you’d catch a good guest star. And besides
there were only three networks….).

The Wilson/Arts cartoons for S&C were indeed forerunners of music videos (and the descendents of the many musical cartoons
of the Thirties and Forties). Wilson was wise to concentrate on the “story
songs” of the time, in order to create repeating characters and have the viewer
“connect” with the piece in a very short span of time.

The shorts were drawn in a simplistic,
funky-looking style, and someone (probably the S&C producers) decided that
goofy sound effects should be added to the soundtrack. Fourteen of these
cartoons were made for the show between 1970 and 1973.

In most cases the songs were sung by Sonny and
Cher, but in certain cases the original vocal was retained. Some of the S&C
vocals were replaced by the originals on the VHS collections of Wilson’s shorts
that came out in the Eighties (and are going for outrageous amounts on eBay).

In some cases they were made to entertain children in the viewing audience, as
with the cartoon for “Candy Man”; others below could be watched by kids, but they could
only be understood by adults. One of the more interesting uploads is one gent’s
appropriation of Wilson’s cartoon for the Tony Orlando and Dawn hit “Sweet Gypsy Rose.”

His rendition is dubbed over the S&C version of the song, but
it’s still worth catching because the cartoon is so bizarre — Wilson decided to
make the errant stripping wife so freaky that the crowd runs out of the strip
joint when she undresses:

As for something that works both for kids and
adults, there’s this cartoon video for Melanie’s “Brand New Key,” which Cher
sings as innocently as Melanie did (sexual metaphor left in the lyrics only):

Wilson clearly did want to illustrate story
songs, but one of the odder choices was Randy Newman’s “Love Story” (sung to absolute perfection by Harry Nilsson). True to form with Randy (and Harry), the
song is both incredibly moving and insidiously realistic — the lovers’ tale
ends with them having children who send them “away to a little home in Florida”
where they’ll play checkers all day “until we pass away.” (Randy’s sharp
closing being the aural equivalent of the Buster Keaton film that ends with His
and Hers gravestones.)

It’s an odd choice for an adorable cartoon on a
prime time variety show, but things were *much* different in the early
Seventies, and so we have the trajectory of a relationship, but (for obvious
reasons) the figures involved are the Bonos (who were always hard to view as a
loving couple given their arguing shtick — and the eventual fact that they’d
continue on as a show-biz couple even after their divorce).

The moving nature of the song is blunted by the
cuteness of some of the images and the inclusion of S&C, but at least they
retained the sudden ending of the lyrics:

The one time that a vocal by Cher was warranted
was, natch, when Wilson animated one of her solo singles, “Dark Lady.” As with
many of the story songs from this period, the lyrics imply a certain menace
(and lo, a gun appears in the narrator’s hand!). This song was clearly intended
as a follow-up to her hit “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.”

Now, finally one of the cartoons with the
original singer on the soundtrack! One of the biggest hits of the early
Seventies, “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” rendered in cartoon fashion. This is the
Wilson ‘toon I remembered the most vividly from my childhood (the other being
the Joni entry below).

The oddest part of this fun little picture: Sonny
and Cher being superimposed as bartenders.

The next one is fascinating choice: an album
track from the Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies album, "Alcohol" (called here "Demon Alcohol"). It’s a very
catchy tune, but as always with Mr. Davies’ best efforts, is also a wry piece of
social commentary disguised as a hook-driven pop tune.

It’s very bizarre that Wilson chose to animate a
song that was not a hit single; his credits at the Fine Arts website indicate
that the Kinks' original version was used on the S&C show, but studio singer
Wayne Carpenter is heard here. Pretty gloomy stuff for a prime time network
variety show:

Now for a hardcore dose of the early Seventies,
we turn to the impossible-to-forget “One Tin Soldier,” a song that became a hit
several times, but is now and forever identified with the Tom Laughlin film
Billy Jack.

The song has an odd history — it was written and
originally recorded by the Canadian group the Original Caste. When it was
adopted for the Laughlin film, they recruited rock vocalist supreme Jinx
Dawson, who chose to credit her recording to her band Coven (more of them in a
future blog post, I love their stuff).

I close out with the two best Wilson cartoon
music-vids, if only because they represent the yin and yang of early Seventies
pop-rock. First comes the aforementioned menacing pop-hit story songs. Perhaps
the oddest and most haunting example of this phenomenon is Helen Reddy’s “Angie
Baby,” a catchy and creepy tune about a psycho-girl who kills a boy who's
stalking her.

Reddy was the queen of psycho-girl songs – “Leave
Me Alone” and “Delta Dawn” being her other two classics in this small but
potent sub-genre. Alan O'Day (the singer-songwriter who gave us one of the most
creative songs about masturbation, “Undercover Angel”) wrote the song and it
still is a curious, weird little ditty.

A neighbor boy “with evil on his mind” haunts our
radio-obsessed heroine and she ultimately gets revenge – he enters her bedroom
and is “pulled off the ground” by the music. He disappears, and we're left with
the image of a “crazy girl with a secret lover who keeps her satisfied.” (One assumes
Angie has stowed the guy in the closet and removes him for her own purposes.)

Wilson/Fine Arts took a very interesting approach
to the super-creepy song by making the character of Angie a broadly goofy
barefoot hippie girl who actually IS a radio. Included are images of pop-rock
artists (Elton John, The Beatles, Jim Croce, Stevie Wonder, etc.). I understand why they had to somehow soften
the images conjured up by the song, but it STILL is a wonderfully weird cartoon:

And lastly, the best-remembered of all of
Wilson's musical cartoons, his take on musical goddess Joni Mitchell’s
catchy-as-HELL ecological anthem “Big Yellow Taxi.”

In this instance Wilson and crew really seemed to
love what they were doing, crafting imagery that once again “spells out” the
song, but also has fun with Joni’s imagery and jovial tone. It's no wonder this
is considered the best of these fascinating artifacts:

Saturday, July 6, 2013

I have a number of blog
posts in “various stages of development,” but I wanted to draw
some attention to the DVD reviews I've been doing on a regular basis
for the Disc Dish site. I put a lot of work into in to these pieces
and am proud of 'em. As always, thanks for reading this blog: